In the case of primitivism about laws, the difficulties can apparently easily be overcome at first sight, since quantum gravity laws or nomic relations, whatever they are according to the theory, just need to be accepted as primitive—after all, as [1]} puts it, the primitivist “analysis of laws is no analysis at all”. However, on its own, such a trivial move is hardly satisfactory, even by the primitivist's own lights, since primitivism about (fundamental physical) laws (at least in Maudlin's version) is justified by the work (fundamental physical) laws can do, if accepted as primitive, in providing a clear foundation for notoriously difficult notions such as counterfactuals and causation. But it is not clear what exactly it is that accepting laws as primitive can achieve in a context without spacetime. For instance, the powerful primitivist scheme for evaluating counterfactuals we have discussed in the last section (§REF ) heavily relies on the initial value formulation and so is just not available at the level of quantum gravity—at least, not in any obvious, straightforward way.
